[BjoernKW]

World-renowned linguist and all people are talking about is his political views (mostly by his own design).

Make no mistake, Chomsky's work was significant to both linguistics proper (X-bar theory, generative grammar, universal grammar) and computer science (Chomsky hierarchy).

In recent years though he more often than not comes across as a grumpy old man who can't seem to accept the fact that linguistic theory has moved on to often simpler, more elegant approaches.

[foldr]

> linguistic theory has moved on to often simpler, more elegant approaches.

As a linguist, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. There have always been alternative approaches. But we have not recently been blessed with any that are clear winners in terms of simplicity and elegance.

[BjoernKW]

HPSG or statistical approaches in computational linguistics, for instance.

Now, of course one can argue - as Chomsky himself has done - that statistical approaches are not as elegant as rule-based ones but as human language faculty quite likely behaves statistically to some degree, statistical methods for describing language do have some merit.

[foldr]

Linguistic theory has not "moved on" to HPSG. HPSG originated in the early 90s and remains a minority pursuit.

The term "statistical approaches" could mean almost anything. There have always been people who are more interested in building, say, practical machine translation systems than in figuring out how kids acquire grammatical knowledge. But again, the field has not "moved on". There are just different groups of researchers working on different problems.

[indubitably]

Could mean almost anything but what generativist linguistics (or whatever the latest label for the Chomskyan school) does, which continues to promote the notion that language is essentially algebraic, that "grammaticality" is binary, and so forth. It's simply not the case that Chomsky is "okay" with approaches to the study of language which are not in accord wiht his own. He repeatedly dismisses whole subdisciplines as "uninteresting," but in context those complaints don't mean "uninteresting to me," they mean "worthless."

[foldr]

>promote the notion [...] that "grammaticality" is binary

I don't know a single generative linguist who is committed to the claim that grammaticality is binary. And there is lots of published work in generative linguistics that explicitly does not assume this. Where are you getting this idea from, exactly?

>language is essentially algebraic,

Not sure what this means. If it just means that sentences have structure, then yes, generative linguistics is committed to this obviously true claim.

>He repeatedly dismisses whole subdisciplines as "uninteresting," but in context those complaints don't mean "uninteresting to me," they mean "worthless."

He's entitled to his opinion, no? It's not as if no-one ever criticizes his work.

[red75prime]

I heard that the Universal Grammar reached the peak of simplicity and generality by recursively applying "join-a-word" action. Are those rumors exaggerated?

[foldr]

I'm not sure what you're referring to, sorry.